Design of Hybrid Wired/Wireless Fieldbus Network for Turbine Power Generation System

Hybrid fieldbus network integrating wireless networks with existing wired fieldbuses has become new a research direction in industrial automation systems. In comparison to wired fieldbuses, the hybrid wired/wireless fieldbus network has a different system architecture, data transmission mechanism, communication protocol, etc. This leads to different challenges that need to be addressed. This paper proposes a hybrid wired/wireless fieldbus network which consists of a wireless industrial control network (WICN), a wired PROFIBUS-DP (Process Field Bus-Decentralized Periphery) fieldbus network, and a wired MODBUS/TCP (Mod Bus/Transmission Control Protocol) fieldbus network. They are connected by a new gateway which uses a shared data model to solve data exchange in different network protocols. In this paper, we describe the architecture of the proposed hybrid wired/wireless fieldbus network and data transmission mechanisms in detail, and then evaluate the performance of hybrid fieldbus network via a set of experiments. The experiment results confirm that the proposed hybrid wired/wireless fieldbus network can satisfy the performance requirement of industrial network control systems. Furthermore, in order to further investigate feasibility of the proposed hybrid wired/wireless fieldbus network, it is deployed at a steam turbine power generation system, and the performance figures obtained further verify its feasibility and effectiveness.